In this subject, students
explore textual and visual representations of Pacific Islanders
and Aboriginal Australians, with particular focus on women and
gender relations. Most of the representations studied were
produced by male colonial Europeans and require rigorous critical
reading to identify and deconstruct their ethnocentric, racist,
colonialist and gendered presumptions. Particular attention is
paid to the cultural, political and strategic contexts which they
described and in which they were written and read. Theories of
race, gender, representation, discourse analysis and postcolonial
critique are considered for the light they throw on the texts
consulted, and are themselves subject to critical scrutiny.

There are five main themes.
In Semester 1: (1) ambivalent images of paradise (early European
contacts with Tahiti and Australia; the myth of 'paradise lost';
invidious comparisons); (2) women, Christianity and colonialism.
In Semester 2: (3) anthropological representations of Pacific
women; (4) challenges to anthropological orthodoxies (especially
feminist critiques); (5) representations and self-representations
of women in the postcolonial Pacific (literary representations;
"custom" and feminism).

reading
guide - Semester 1

WEEK 1:

introduction

Lecture:

Introduction: imag(in)ing
others.

Workshop:

Introduction; name game;
general discussion of ethnocentrism, racism and gendering
in popular primitivist discourses.

Handout

"Lured by the Lost
Tribes", Age, 26 August 1989, "Saturday
Extra", 17.

WEEK 2:

a general problematic -
primitivism, gender, reading

Lecture:

Choosing appropriate words:
cultural description as discourse.

Robert Borofsky and Alan
Howard

"The Early Contact
Period", in Alan Howard and Robert Borofsky, Developments
in Polynesian Ethnology (Honolulu 1989), 250-69.

- what does
"primitivism" mean? What forms does it take and
in what ways are they discourses rather than simply ideas
or ideologies?

- what strategies does Mani
propose for a critical, subversive, against-the-grain
reading of colonial (male) texts in order to recuperate
"the possibility of a female subjectivity that is
shifting, contradictory, inconsistent" (p. 397).
What are their pros and cons? What are the politics of her
representations - her discourse?

Mr Bligh's Bad Language:
Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge
1992).

Douglas L. Oliver

Ancient Tahitian Society (Canberra
1974), 3 vols.

Film:

Charles Chauvel's In the
Wake of the Bounty (1933).

Workshop:

Contemporary and later
representations of first contacts in Tahiti: the politics
of nomenclature.

- what indications are there
from Robertson's account of the first European visit to
Tahiti that Tahitians and Europeans placed different
meanings on what happened? Who "possessed"
whom? Who exploited whom? Who depended on whom? Why does
it matter to an historian?

- compare and contrast the
appropriateness in Tahitian terms of Pearson's discourse
of political/economic reaction, compared with
Dening's focus on Tahitian ritual actions.

Core Reading:

George Robertson

The Discovery of Tahiti:
a Journal of the Second Voyage of H.M.S. Dolphin
Round the World, under the Command of Captain Wallis,
R.N., in the Years 1766, 1767 and 1768 Written by her
Master George Robertson (ed. Hugh Carrington)(London
1948), 135-170.

Greg Dening

"Possessing
Tahiti", Archaeology in Oceania, 21
(1986):103-18.

W.H. Pearson

"European Intimidation
and the Myth of Tahiti", Journal of Pacific
History, 4 (1969):199-217.

WEEK 4:

Tahitian women in early
European experience and fantasies

Lecture:

Gender and subversion of
dominant colonial discourses: reading ambivalence in
Beatrice Grimshaw's In the Strange South Seas.

Workshop:

Early European
representations of women in Tahiti.

- what were the
relationships between empirical observations,
ethnocentrism/racism, and gendering in Robertson's,
Banks' and Cook's descriptions of Tahitian women? (See
also visual representations from Cook's voyages in the
Recommended Reading.)

- what is the significance
of the genre (= "kind") of text:
contemporary or later?

- do these eighteenth
century images bear out Torgovnick's contention that
"gender issues always inhabit Western versions of
the primitive" (p. 17)?

Core Reading:

Extracts from contemporary
texts:

(1) George Robertson, The
Discovery of Tahiti: a Journal of the Second Voyage of
H.M.S. Dolphin Round the World, under the Command
of Captain Wallis, R.N., in the Years 1766, 1767 and 1768
Written by her Master George Robertson (ed. Hugh
Carrington)(London 1948), 148, 154, 166-67, 177,
180, 184-85, 196-209, 215, 224-25 (June-July 1867);

European Vision and the
South Pacific (New York 1985; Melbourne 1989), chs
1-3.

Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard
Smith

The Art of Captain Cook's
Voyages (Melbourne 1985), vol. 1, The Voyage of
the Endeavour 1768-1771, 20-23, 112-14; vol.
2, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure
1772-1775, 40-46, 58-65.

Harriet Guest

"The Great Distinction:
Figures of the Exotic in the Work of William
Hodges", Oxford Art Journal, 12 (1989):36-58.

WEEK 5:

Polynesian women in
Western discourses

Lecture:

Politics and poetics of
ethnographic representations of women's actions and
status in Polynesia.

Workshop:

Discourses of gender, rank
and sacredness in Polynesia.

- what do we know about
gender relations, the meanings of tapu:noa and the
power of high-ranking women in indigenous Polynesian
societies? How?

- how adequate are the
concepts used in the texts, especially
"pollution"?

- consider the politics of
the representation of gender in terms of (a) Polynesian
discourses of rank and hierarchy; (b) European/Christian
ethnocentrism and androcentrism; (c) anti- and
postcolonialism; (d) feminism.

"Introduction", in
Caroline Ralston and Nicholas Thomas (ed.), Sanctity
and Power: Gender in Polynesian History. Special
issue, Journal of Pacific History, 22
(1987):115-22.

Nicholas Thomas

"Domestic Structures
and Polyandry in the Marquesas Islands", in Margaret
Jolly and Martha Macintyre (ed.), Family and Gender in
the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial
Impact (Cambridge 1989), 65-83.

WEEK 6:

domesticating the exotic,
change as indigenisation

Lecture:

Imperial projects and the
politics of agency and change.

Workshop:

Gender relations and
transformations of Hawaiian society.

- in what ways might women's
lives and social relationships have changed in early
postcontact Hawaii? How can we know?

- how useful is Sahlins'
theory of the reproduction of cultural categories and
their transformation in novel action contexts, given
Ralston's history of early postcontact Hawaii and Thomas'
critique? How does each author conceive the contribution
of women to transforming Hawaiian society?

Core Reading:

Caroline Ralston

"Changes in the lives
of ordinary women in early post-contact Hawaii", in
Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre (ed.), Family and
Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the
Colonial Impact (Cambridge 1989), 45-64.

Marshall Sahlins

Historical Metaphors and
Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the
Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor 1981), esp. ch.
3.

Nicholas Thomas

Out of Time: History and
Evolution in Anthropological Discourse (Cambridge
1989), 102-16.

WEEK 7:

stereotypes of Tahiti:
passive victims out of time

Lecture:

Noble savages and fatal
impacts.

Alan Moorehead

The Fatal Impact: an
Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific 1767-1840 (London
1966).

Bernard Smith

European Vision and the
South Pacific (New York 1985; Melbourne 1989), chs
1-5, 7, 11.

Video:

A Place of Power in
French Polynesia (1984).

Workshop:

"Paradise Lost"?
Tahitian women in Western literature and art:

- what images of Tahitian
women did Gauguin convey in (a) his autobiographical
novel; (b) his art? Why?

- consider the significance
of Gauguin's work in terms of Western discourses of art,
the primitive and gender as discussed by Torgovnick and
Solomon-Godeau. What are the advantages and
ethnographic/conceptual limitations of their critiques?

- "Western idealization
of the primitive has been as damaging as any other
Western version and often conceals more pejorative
views" (Torgovnick, p. 122). What does she mean? In
what ways are idealisation of the primitive and civilised
nostalgia for a lost primitive paradise (the "noble
savage"; the "fatal impact"; the
"romantic/tragic savage") as demeaning as more
negative forms of racism? Compare the tendency of modern
Islands and Aboriginal nationalists to romanticise the
precontact past.

European Vision and the
South Pacific (New York 1985; Melbourne 1989).

Nicholas Thomas

"The Force of
Ethnology: Origins and Significance of the
Melanesia/Polynesia Division", Current
Anthropology, 30 (1989):27-34.

Workshop:

comparaing European images
of Polynesians and "Melanesians," especially
women:

- what were the varied,
changing, and at times ambivalent, criteria of
description and classification of Pacific Islanders used
in these texts? Note changing meanings of the terms
"race", "nation", "tribe",
"variety", and the increase in emphasis on
collective, rather than internal differentiation.

- compare and contrast the
casual ethnocentrism of late eighteenth century
scientific empiricism (Cook/Forster) with the a priori
racism of nineteenth and twentieth century evolutionism
(d'Urville/Grimshaw). In what ways did contemporary
discourses help shape European images of Islanders?
Critically consider Jolly's or Thomas' critique.

An Account in Two Volumes
of Two Voyages to the South Seas by Captain ... Jules
S.-C. Dumont d'Urville of the French Navy ..., tr.
and ed. Helen Rosenman, vol. 1, Astrolabe 1826-1829
(Melbourne 1987) (TS extracts).

"'Illnatured
comparisons': Racism and Relativism in European
Representations of Ni-Vanuatu from Cook's Second
Voyage", History and Anthropology, 5
(1992):331-64.

Recommended Reading:

Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard
Smith

The Art of Captain Cook's
Voyages, vol. 2, The Voyage of the Resolution
and Adventure 1772-1775 (Melbourne 1985), esp.
86-101 - compare Hodges' depictions of Maori with those
of other Polynesians, and the several versions of images
of people encountered at Malakula, Erromango and Tanna
(New Hebrides [Vanuatu]) and in New Caledonia.

"Autonomous and
Controlled Spirits: Traditional Ritual and Early
Interpretations of Christianity on Tanna, Aneityum and
the Isle of Pines in Comparative Perspective", Journal
of the Polynesian Society, 98 (1989):7-48.

Workshop:

Charlotte Geddie on
Aneityumese women and men; Beatrice Grimshaw on Fijians
and ni-Vanuatu.

- what were Charlotte
Geddie's impressions of Aneityumese women and men? How
did her impressions of each differ? Why?

- what were her (and her
daughter's) conceptions of her role, experiences and
relationships with Islanders?

- what were the main tropes
and discourses in Charlotte Geddie's text? In what ways
were they similar to/different from those of other
categories of European encountered so far and from those
of the early twentieth century travel writer Beatrice
Grimshaw?

"Colonial Conversions:
Difference, Hierarchy, and History in Early
Twentieth-Century Evangelical Propaganda", Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 4 (1992): 366-89.

Video:

The Transformed Isle
(c. 1907-17).

Workshop:

Male and female European
discourses on Aneityumese women.

- compare and contrast
Charlotte Geddie's images of Aneityumese women with those
of John Geddie, John Inglis and the anonymous seaman.

- what can we know from
contemporary texts about Aneityumese women's experiences
of indigenous and European male behaviour, their
understandings of Christianity and their significance in
the Christianisation of Aneityum? How?

- compare and contrast the
different genres of text and interpretation, focussing on
the construction of discourses about widow strangling.

- compare and contrast the
varying roles attributed to nineteenth century European
missionary women in Hawaii, Aneityum and Papua New
Guinea, with particular attention to time, place,
denomination, and correlation with contemporary
discourses of femininity and domesticity. How significant
were women in missionary enterprises?

- how were missionary women
constructed by male missionaries? by each other? by
feminist historians?

Core Reading:

Minnie Billing

Sister Minnie's (Billing)
Life and Work in Papua (Sydney 1930), 23-94.

John Inglis

In the New Hebrides.
Reminiscences of Missionary Life and Work, Especially on
the Island of Aneityum, from 1850 till 1877 (London
1887), 261-94.

"The Object Lesson of a
Civilised, Christian Home", in Margaret Jolly and
Martha Macintyre (ed.), Family and Gender in the
Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact
(Cambridge 1989), 84-94.

Isles of Adventure: From
Java to New Caledonia but Principally Papua (Boston
1931), 1-26.

WEEK 13:

women and Christianity

Lecture:

Modern Islanders' stories
about missionaries and their impact on family life, daily
lives and sexuality: a Tubetube case study, Milne Bay
Province, PNG.

Workshop:

Women and Christianity in
the Pacific.

- what were/are the
attractions and meanings of Christianity to Massim and
Solomon Islands women? In what ways does
"conversion" mean loss of indigenous culture,
or indigenising Christianity?

- compare and contrast male
and female, traditionalist and Christian, Europeans' and
Islanders' positions in the texts consulted.

- in what ways were
Keesing's and Young's questions and interpretations
shaped by their own liberal, agnostic, anthropological
discourses and the particular indigenous discourses they
favoured?

Core Reading:

Alice Wedega

Listen, My Country
(Sydney 1981), vii-viii, 11-29.

Nuis Blong Mere
(newsletter of the Solomon Islands National Council of
Women), 2 July, 3 October 1984, 5 May 1985.

Roger M. Keesing

"Sins of a Mission:
Christian Life as Kwaio Traditionalist Ideology", in
Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre (ed.), Family and
Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the
Colonial Impact (Cambridge 1989), 193-212.

Michael W. Young

"Suffer the Children:
Wesleyans in the D'Entrecasteaux", in Margaret Jolly
and Martha Macintyre (ed.), Family and Gender in the
Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact
(Cambridge 1989), 108-34.

Anthropology, colonialism
and the establishment of an academic discipline.

Video:

H.A. Powell's The
Trobriand Islanders (1986 [1951]) - excerpts.

Workshop:

Women as objects of study in
missionary and early colonial ethnography.

- what images of Melanesian
and Samoan women did George Brown sketch in his
ethnology? What words and discourse did he use to
construct them? Where did his information come from?
Compare Brown's representations of women with Geddie's
and Seligmann's.

- what were the intellectual
aims of Seligmann's expedition to British New Guinea? Who
were the informants/authoritative persons for the
information recorded? Whose discourse was it?

Core Reading:

George Brown

Melanesians and
Polynesians: their Life-Histories Described and Compared
(London 1910), v-vii, 31-49 [George Brown, missionary in
Samoa, founder of the Methodist mission in Papua New
Guinea, also wrote an autobiographical account of his
missionary activities; in it he referred to particular
incidents, particular male Islanders, but almost never
to women; he was a valued correspondent of the
anthropologists Tylor and Frazer].

C.G. Seligmann

The Melanesians of
British New Guinea (New York 1976 [reprint, Cambridge
1910]), v-x, 478-512, 565-73, 708-14.

WEEK 2:

Malinowski, the
Trobriands and women

Lecture:

Malinowski and the invention
of fieldwork.

Video:

The Trobriand Islanders
of Papua New Guinea (1990).

Workshop:

Malinowski and women: as
ethnographer and man.

- how did Malinowski
establish/assert his authority? In what ways was his
study "scientific"? primitivist?

- how did Malinowski justify
his focus on sexuality? What are the problems with his
project and his gaze?

- what was the significance
of women in his ethnography? Why?

- what relationships between
Malinowski as scientist and man were suggested in Sexual
Life compared with the diary? Why?

The Sexual Life of
Savages in North-Western Melanesia (3rd edition,
London 1932 [1929]), Preface (by Havelock Ellis), Special
Foreword to the Third Edition, Foreword to the First
Edition,vii-xii, xix-xxv, xlv-l.

"On the Questioning of
as Many as Six Impossible Things about Freeman"s
Samoa Before Breakfast", in Gregory Acciaioli (ed.),
Fact and Context in Ethnography: the Samoa Controversy,
special issue Canberra Anthropology, 6: 1 (1983),
1-16.

WEEK 5:

women in PNG Highlands
anthropology

Lecture:

Anthropology and the
conceptualisation of equality and hierarchy in Melanesia.

- compare and contrast the
representations of female-male relations and the status
of Mendi women by Ryan, Lederman and in the video, with
particular attention to gender, discourse and chronology.

- whose construction was
"sexual antagonism"? Why? What did the concept,
or its equivalent, signify in Meggitt's classification of
Highlands societies? How, if at all, was it
applied/applicable to the Mendi?

Core Reading (see MAP
in handbook):

The Mendi (video).

Rena Lederman

"Who Speaks Here?
Formality and the Politics of Gender in Mendi, Highland
Papua New Guinea", Journal of the Polynesian
Society, 89 (1980), 479-98.

M.J. Meggitt

"Male-Female
Relationships in the Highlands of Australian New
Guinea", in Thomas G. Harding and Ben J. Wallace, Cultures
of the Pacific: Selected Readings (New York 1970),
125-43, 438-41 [first published 1964].

D'A. Ryan

"Marriage in
Mendi", in R.M. Glasse and M.J. Meggitt (ed.), Pigs,
Pearlshells, and Women: Marriage in the New Guinea
Highlands (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1969),
159-75.

Recommended Reading:

Gilbert H. Herdt and Fitz
John P. Poole

"'Sexual Antagonism':
the Intellectual History of a Concept in New Guinea
Anthropology", in Fitz John P. Poole and Gilbert H.
Herdt, Sexual Antagonism, Gender, and Social Change in
Papua New Guinea, special issue Social Analysis,
12 (1982), 3-28.

WEEK 6:

women as objects,
subjects, persons

Lecture:

The problem of bias, female
ethnography and changes in perspectives on Highlands
ethnography.

Workshop:

Female agency and gender in
Melanesian anthropology.

- what similarities and
differences in interpretation and experience of
female-male relations and the status of indigenous women
are there in this week's readings compared with last?
Why? In what ways are the differences theoretical,
cultural, historical, political, gendered?

- what are female agency and
subjectivity? How can they be identified? Do they matter?
Why were they not an issue in earlier ethnographies?

Core Reading:

Lisette Josephides

"Equal but Different?
The Ontology of Gender Among Kewa", Oceania,
53 (1983), 291-307.

"Banana Leaf Bundles
and Skirts: a Pacific Penelope's Web", in James G.
Carrier (ed.), History and Tradition in Melanesian
Anthropology (Berkeley 1992), 38-63.

Caroline Ralston

"The Study of Women in
the Pacific", Contemporary Pacific, 4 (1992),
162-75.

WEEK 8:

anthropology and feminism

Lecture:

Anticolonial and
postcolonial critiques of anthropology: some keywords.

Video:

Anthropology on Trial
(1983).

Workshop:

Feminist critiques of
anthropology: how feminist? how anthropological?

- what issues have feminists
seen as central to their theoretical and substantive
interests? What are the differences between an
anthropology of women, feminist anthropology and
anthropology of gender?

- what are the varying
meanings of difference (cultural, gender, racial and
class) to feminists and feminist anthropologists? How
have intersections between different differences over
time been conceived? Compare Macintyre's argument for a
focus on commonalities.

Core Reading:

Micaela di Leonardo

"Introduction: Gender,
Culture and Political Economy: Feminist Anthropology in
Historical Perspective", in Micaela di Leonardo
(ed.),Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge? Feminist
Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley 1991),
1-48.

- how were women variously
represented by these male Papua New Guinean and (New
Zealand educated) Samoan authors? How did they treat
sexual and gender relations in the context of tensions
between custom and modernity?

- in what ways do these
fictional representations contradict/confirm ethnographic
representations of female-male relations in Papua New
Guinea and Samoa?

Tali, in Mike Greicus
(ed.), Three Short Novels from Papua New Guinea
(Auckland 1976), 87-140 [the novel moved between a
village setting in the Siassi Islands and Port Moresby
and Rabaul].

*Albert Wendt

"A Talent", in The
Birth and Death of the Miracle Man: a Collection of Short
Stories (Harmondsworth 1987), 11-30 [the story moved
between village and urban settings in Samoa].

WEEK 11:

modern Pacific women's
fiction

Lecture:

Pacific women's voices:
women's organisations, women's writings.

Workshop:

Modern women's fictional
writings in the Pacific.

- compare and contrast the
themes and discourses of the Maori short stories by
Patricia Grace and Keri Hulme (indigenous writers in a
modern Western nation), Samoan Apelu Aiavao's short story
(a writer - gender unclear to me - in an independent,
postcolonial nation), and the extract from Vilsoni
Hereniko's recent postmodernist play, based on Teresia
Teaiwa's story (Hereniko is a male Polynesian playwright;
Teaiwa a female Afro-American/Micronesian postgraduate
student at the University of California, who has mostly
lived in Fiji).

- how are these texts
different from/similar to the male fictional writings
read last week, in terms of themes and representations of
women, gender relations and custom/ modernity? Why?

- were these distinctively
women's voices?

Core Reading:

Apelu Aiavoa

"The Married
Couple", Mana: a South Pacific Journal of
Language and Literature, 3 (1979), 2-12.

Patricia Grace

"A Way of
Talking", in Witi Ihimaera and D.S. Long (ed.), Into
the World of Light: an Anthology of Maori Writing (Auckland
1982), 198-202.

- what relationships were
there between "custom" (inherited or
constructed? essential or innovating?) and
"development" in Sexton's representation of the
wok meri movement? Compare the status and agency
attributed to these Eastern Highlands women with the Enga
women's self-accounts in Kyakas and Weissner.

- what varied and ambivalent
attitudes towards "custom",
"development", domesticity, violence were
suggested in the modern Melanesian women's writings
sampled in the handbook? What were the important issues
for these educated women compared with the PNG Highlands
village women described by Sexton and Kyakas and
Weissner? Why?

Nuis Blong Mere
(newsletter of the Solomon Islands National Council of
Women), 2 July, 3 October 1984, 5 May 1985.

Recommended Reading:

Colin Filer

"What is this Thing
Called 'Brideprice'?", Mankind, 15 (1985),
163-83.

M.J. Meggitt

"Women in Contemporary
Central Enga Society, Papua New Guinea", in Margaret
Jolly and Martha Macintyre (ed.), Family and Gender in
the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial
Impact (Cambridge 1989), 135-55.

- what indications are there
in these texts of changes since independence in 1980 in
the things that mattered to ni-Vanuatu women: from
anticolonialist nationalism to a more dfferentiated
critique of all kinds of oppression, in terms of gender
and class, as well as race.

- in what ways might this
transformation involve strategic appropriation and
indigenisation in local struggles of feminist and human
rights discourses, which had previously been rejected on
nationalist and cultural grounds?